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Precarity of migrant workers

Why does a pandemic make the life of a migrant worker unsustainable in the city?  
Last Updated 04 August 2021, 18:07 IST

The recent Supreme Court directive to the Centre to register all unorganised, migrant workers, and provide them with food during the pandemic, needs to be lauded. This might be a time, however, when we could reflect on the question: Why does a pandemic make the life of a migrant worker unsustainable in the city?

In a context where manufacturing jobs have declined, as in India, agrarian distress-led migrants have crowded into the construction sector, and partially, in low-end services. Employment in the construction sector as a percentage of the total non-agricultural employment is 20.3% (according to the last census in 2011). While a skilled construction worker makes a decent urban living, a large number is unskilled, whose wages can be as low as Rs 200-250 per day, who do not get work every day of the week, live in fragile, informal settlements in the city’s outskirts, or on construction sites. They lack voter cards, ration cards, schools and healthcare services. In a harsh and alien urban world, where low-earning migrants are constantly at the sharp edge of falling through the cracks (illness, occupational accidents and death), they regularly return to the village, to supplement their earnings during harvests, to take care of families left behind. The dismal quality of available urban work defines the life cycle of the typical circular migrant.

The reach of welfare or protective legislation to migrant communities has remained extremely low. In 2013, a Public Interest Litigation revealed that 15 private construction companies, associated with the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation, had employed migrants without obtaining the necessary registration under the Inter-State Migrant Workmen’s Act, and highlighted poor working conditions at Bengaluru’s metro construction sites. In Karnataka several NGOs have brought to light that a whopping Rs 8,000 crore remains collected in the Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Board (as cess from construction projects) under the Labour Department, but so far has not been used for migrant construction workers. Less than 10% of the construction workforce in Karnataka is even registered. In a case study of construction workers in the NCR region, conducted by well-known migration scholar Ravi Srivastava in 2014, 99% recorded that they were not aware of any of the regulatory laws applicable to workers in this sector. Estimates based on computation from the NSS 68th Round for 2011-12 showed that 96.8% of paid employees in construction did not have any written contract and 97.8% did not have any kind of social security.

The unregulated nature of employment in the construction industry manifested in the vulnerabilities of its vast migrant workforce during the pandemic. Several other traditional labour-intensive industries like powerlooms in Maharashtra which employs a large number of migrants from UP and Bihar and the artificial silk industry in Surat which employing workers from Odisha, also saw massive reverse migration of workers, and their eventual return to cities, only to face the second wave and the need to revert back to their villages. A study of migrant workers from the states of Bihar, UP, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Orissa revealed that of those who had returned to their villages during the first lockdown, 64% re-migrated in search of work. When the second wave and the subsequent lockdowns began, thousands lost work once more, and had hardly had any time to make any savings. Thus began the second round of reverse migration.

For migrant workers, the village, then, can offer only a temporary retreat, not livelihoods; and the city is indeed a place of subsistence earnings, not of a stable income and life. This dual precarity starkly highlights the failure of India’s currently pursued model of urbanisation. The work available in cities is marked by unregulated wages, absence of tenurial security and employment-related benefits.

As thousands flowed between cities and villages, there was a rush to donate, distribute food and rations, to help migrants return to their villages and now, finally, the apex court’s directive to the government to provide food to migrant workers. These endeavours reflect a broader social conscience responding to a crisis. However, if the public response is going to be more than momentary and episodic, it would be necessary to recognise that migrant distress in the pandemic is only an extreme form of the economic marginality which marks their lives in normal times.

(The writer is a visiting professor Urban and Mobility Studies Program, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru)

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(Published 04 August 2021, 17:47 IST)

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